Susie Dent: "Body parts have a habit of popping up in unexpected ways in our vocabulary"
Body parts secretly flesh out lots of our words and phrases. Our resident etymologist feels it in her bones.
Body parts secretly flesh out lots of our words and phrases. Our resident etymologist feels it in her bones.
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of hosting an awards evening for the Royal College of Nursing, celebrating the profound impact that nurses and their teams make on our lives. Speaking with a few of them at dinner, I was reminded of some of the magical stories hidden within the medical dictionary that they draw on every day.
To add to the fun, body parts have a habit of popping up in unexpected ways in our vocabulary. For example, the word ‘supercilious’ conjures up a haughty individual sniffing the air, one eyebrow raised in disdain. That eyebrow is the key to the word, for the Latin supercilius meant exactly that.
As for the arrogant sniff, ‘snooty’ is of course related to ‘snout’. Some parts of our anatomy attract more synonyms than others. While designing a T-shirt for a prostate cancer charity some years ago, I found in the historical thesaurus such verbal delights as whirligigs, tallywags, Aunt Pollys, nerts, and gingmabobs. Perhaps more men would go to regular check-ups if they were held at the ‘twiddle-diddles clinic’.
One of the etymologies most enjoyed by the nurses involved the word ‘muscle’. In ancient times, athletes trained in the buff so that others might admire their toned bodies (the word ‘gymnasium’ famously comes from the Greek for ‘exercise naked’). To the Romans, a gymgoer’s flexed biceps resembled a tiny rodent scuttling beneath the skin, leading to the name musculus, the ancestor of our ‘muscle’ and a word that translates literally as ‘little mouse’. Muscles themselves are interesting. The ‘sartorius’, which lets us put one leg over the other, means ‘tailor’s muscle’, a nod to the cross-legged position of a tailor at work.
The biceps, triceps and quadriceps, meanwhile, are all based on the number of small ceps or ‘heads’ they resemble. There are many more delights. The tragus of the ear is named after the Greek for ‘he-goat’, since it often has tiny tufts of hair growing on it like a billy goat’s beard. The tibia of the leg is a borrowing from the Latin for ‘flute’, since the shinbone is long, straight and hollow, just like the instrument. For memory, we use the hippocampus area of the brain, whose Greek name is a charming reflection of its appearance; it means ‘seahorse’. And the white, crescent-shaped mark at the base of our fingernails is the lunula, a ‘little moon’.
In Old English, the mind was known rather beautifully as a ‘thought-chamber’, while the body was simply the ‘bone-locker’. If you’re looking for a little romance, I can share that the philtrum, the small groove above our lips, is from the Greek for ‘love potion’, because it invites an admirer’s gaze towards kissable lips. Of course, English is nothing without its odd couples. Take bras and brackets. The first bras were worn not by women but by men: brassiere comes from the French for ‘arm guard’, a soldier’s protection for the upper body. As for brackets, as parentheses on paper or as support for shelves, they too were inspired by protection, only for a different part of the anatomy.
French braguette meant ‘armour for the codpiece’: which one imagines to be particularly important in combat. The idea seems to be of something in two parts. Which brings us right back to Aunt Pollys. Nurses, of course, have their own rich etymology – ‘nurse’, ‘nurture’, and ‘nourish’ are all part of the same ancient family. The threads between our words may be invisible, but they tell a thousand stories. It turns out that our bone-locker is a very good place to start
(Hero image credit: Michael Leckie)
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